Mapping Cyclist Safety in New York City

Is there a relationship between bike path access and cyclist injuries?

I was inspired by this CityLab article detailing the impending transportation crisis due to the MTA L Line shutdown. Specifically, I am interested in observing whether the shutdown contributes to an increase in cyclist injuries due to motor vehicle collisions as about 275,000 L Line riders seek alternatives.

NYC DOT has predicted about 2% of L Line riders to switch to cycling, while about 79% are predicted to move to other subway lines. I could investigate the dispersion of L Train riders to other options as a whole if data is available, but for now I will focus on cyclist safety as it’s more approachable with currently available data.

Now let’s look at some two-wheeled data.

And now a map of cyclist injuries and deaths over the last few years.

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Planned Updates / Notes:

This is an ongoing project that I am doing in my free time. If you have any constructive criticism please feel free to reach out, especially with suggestions about spatial regression methodology.

• Methodology
  • Need a way to do geospatial predictive modeling with a dataset that only has 1s, no 0s
  • How to understand relationship between accidents when we only have accident data, not non-accidents
  • Consider using Citibike data as a proxy to cyclist population, but do they behave differently?
  • Look into spatial prediction methods (spatial autocorrelation, spatial regression, etc.)
  • What trends are there in types of bike paths being constructed over time?
• Time-Series
  • More rigorous analysis of cyclist injuries
  • Use ARIMA model to remove seasonality, conclude whether injuries are increasing
  • Are injuries increasing because more people are biking or something else?
    
• Geospatial
  • Consider changing map to chloropleths (and use accidents per capita)
  • Find a way to visualize changes over time, whether through leaflet or gganimate or otherwise
  • Need function that can calculate a point’s (accident) nearest polyline (bike path) and return features (type of path)
    
• Visualizations
  • Change drag behavior (for mobile) when plotly is updated to 1.43